While on holiday in a resort in the French Alps with Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus, Tintin reads about a plane crash in the Gosain Than Massif in the Himalayas. That evening at their hotel, he has a vivid dream that his young Chinese friend Chang Chong-Chen (introduced in The Blue Lotus) is terribly hurt and calling for help from the ruins of a plane crash. The next morning, Tintin reads in the paper that Chang was aboard the plane that crashed in Tibet. Believing that his dream was a telepathic vision, Tintin flies to Katmandu in Nepal via New Delhi, India with Snowy, and a skeptical Captain Haddock. They hire a sherpa named Tharkey, and accompanied by some porters, they travel overland from Nepal to the crash site in Tibet.

One the way, they discover footprints in the snow that Tharkey claims belong to the yeti. The porters abandon the group in fear, and Tintin, Haddock and Tharkey go on and eventually reach the crash site. Tintin sets off with Snowy to try to trace Chang's steps, and after glimpsing at a silhouette in the snow finds a cave in which Chang carved his name on a rock, proving that he survived the crash.

Tharkey believes that Tintin saw the yeti and convinces him that the area is just too large to search. The reporter however changes his mind back after spotting a scarf higher up on a cliff face. While attempting to climb upwards and after having his pick-axe caught with St. Elmo's fire, Haddock loses his grip and hangs perilously down the cliff wall, imperiling Tintin, who is tied to him. He tells Tintin to cut the rope to save himself, but Tintin refuses. Tharkey, who has also had a change of heart moved by Tintin's selflessness, returns just in time to save them. That night, a storm blows away their tent and they have to trek onwards, unable to sleep lest they freeze. They eventually arrive within sight of the Buddhist monastery of Khor-Biyong before collapsing due to exhaustion. An avalanche occurs, and they are buried in the snow.

Blessed Lightning, a monk at the monastery, 'sees' in a vision Tintin, Snowy, Haddock and Tharkey being in peril. Tintin regains consciousness and, unable to reach the monastery himself, gives Snowy a written call for help to deliver. Snowy lets go of the message when he finds a bone, but then realises what he's done, and runs to the monastery to make someone follow him. The monks head after him as he is recognised as the white dog in Blessed Lightning's vision. Two days later, Tintin, Haddock and Tharkey regain consciousness in the monastery and receive an audience with the monks. After Tintin tells the Grand Abbot why they are there, the Abbot tells him to abandon his quest and return to his country. However, Blessed Lightning has another vision, through which Tintin learns that Chang is still alive inside a mountain cave, but that the "migou", or yeti, is also there. Haddock doesn't believe the vision is genuine, but Tintin, after being given directions by the Abbot, travels to Charabang, a small village near the Horn of the Yak, the mountain mentioned by Blessed Lightning. Haddock initially refuses to follow Tintin anymore, but once again changes his mind and pursues him to Charabang. The two of them, and Snowy, head to the Horn of the Yak on the final lap of their journey.

They wait outside until they see the yeti leave the cave. Tintin ventures inside with a camera while Haddock keeps lookout, and he finally finds Chang, who is feverish and shaking. The yeti, finally revealed as a large anthropoid with an oval-shaped head, returns to the cave before Haddock can warn Tintin, and he reacts with anger upon seeing Tintin taking Chang away. As he reaches toward Tintin however, he sets off the flash bulb of the camera, which scares him away. Tintin and Haddock carry Chang back to the village of Charabang, and he explains to them that the yeti saved him after the crash and took him away from the rescue parties. Along the way, they briefly encounter the yeti again, and he is scared off this time by Haddock blowing his nose.

After Chang has been prepared for comfortable transport, he, Tintin and Haddock are met ceremonially by the Grand Abbot and an emissary group of monks, who present Tintin with a silk scarf in honour of the bravery he has shown, and the strength of his friendship with Chang. The monks take them back to Khor-Biyong, and after a week, when Chang has recovered, they return to Nepal by caravan. As their party travels away from the monastery, Chang muses that the yeti is no wild animal, but instead has a human soul, while the yeti sadly watches their departure from a distance.

Initial plot ideas

In 1958, Hergé saw the nineteenth of his Tintin adventures, The Red Sea Sharks, published in book form following its serialisation over the previous few years. Subsequently deciding to begin work on the next story in the series, he came up with numerous potential plot ideas. One of these was to send Tintin back to the United States, where the reporter would once again meet with the Native Americans, as he had done in the third adventure, Tintin in America (1931–32). However Hergé eventually came to the conclusion that returning to the same country he had formerly sent Tintin to was "backward-looking". Another idea that he had was to base a story around the idea of Tintin having to prove that Haddock's butler Nestor was framed for a crime that he didn't commit by his old employers, the Bird Brothers. Again, this was something he also chose to dismiss. A third idea was that Tintin be sent with Professor Calculus to one of the snow-covered poles, where Calculus was needed to help save a stranded group of polar explorers who had gone down with food poisoning, and although the setting in a snowy environment was eventually kept, this plot was also abandoned. Meanwhile the Belgian comic creator Michel Regnier, best known under the pseudonym of Greg (1931–1999), (who was then busy working on Belvision's animated television adaptation of the series, Hergé's Adventures of Tintin), wrote two basic ideas for Tintin adventures that Hergé might potentially take up. This pair, Le Thermozéro (The Thermozero) and Les Pillules (The Pills), both revolved around Tintin rescuing a secret agent and then getting involved with a 'cold bomb' in the former, or 'radioactive pills' in the latter. Again, Hergé felt that this was not the story which he wanted to take up.

The idea of setting the story in Tibet had been influenced by Hergé's friend Jacques Van Melkebeke (1904–1983), who had suggested it back in 1954, possibly being influenced by the fact that he had set the 1940s Tintin play M. Boullock A Disparu (The Disappearance of Mr Boullock) in that country. Initial ideas for the title of the work were Le Museau de la Vache (The Cow's Snout), Le Museau de l'Ours (The Bear's Snout) or Le Museau du Yack (The Yack's Snout), all of which would have been named after a mountain that featured in the latter part of the story. Initially, it was claimed that the title of Tintin in Tibet was chosen because market research indicated that people were more likely to buy a book with Tintin's name in the title, but Tintinologist Harry Thompson instead believed that it was chosen because it was a "title [that] reflected the solo nature of [Tintin's] undertaking."

Hergé's psychological issues

Hergé had reached a particularly traumatic period in his life. He realised that he had fallen out of love with his wife Germaine Remi, whom he married in 1932, and had instead developed a deep mutual attraction with Fanny Vlaminck, a far younger assistant who worked at his Studios Hergé. He began to contemplate divorcing Germaine in order to marry Fanny, with whom he shared many mutual interests, something Germaine did not. As he would later relate, "It meant turning upside down all my values – what a shock! This was a serious moral crisis: I was married, and I loved someone else; life seemed impossible with my wife, but on the other hand I had this scout-like idea of giving my word for ever. It was a real catastrophe. I was completely torn up." During this period, Hergé had begun suffering from repeating nightmares in which he was consistently faced by images of what he described as "the beauty and cruelty of white". As he would later relate to the interviewer Numa Sadoul:

"At the time I was going through a time of real crisis and my dreams were nearly always white dreams. And they were extremely distressing. I took note of them and remember one where I was in a kind of tower made up of a series of ramps. Dead leaves were falling and covering everything. At a particular moment, in an immaculately white alcove, a white skeleton appeared that tried to catch me. And then instantly everything around me became white."

He decided to visit a psychoanalyst to try to decipher what his disturbing dreams meant and what could be done about them. He went to visit the Swiss psychoanalyst Franz Ricklin, a student of the prestigious psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who told him that he must destroy "the white demon of purity" within his mind as soon as he could. Ricklin further advised Hergé that "I don't want to discourage you, but you will never finish your life's work. In your place, I would just stop working now." Although Hergé was tempted to take up Ricklin's advice and abandon the continued writing of Tintin in Tibet, following which he could devote himself to his hobby of abstract art, he decided to instead follow his old scout motto of "A scout smiles and sings through all his difficulties." He would divorce his wife to marry Fanny, and would also continue the writing and illustrating of Tintin in Tibet. As Tintinologist Harry Thompson noted, "It was ironic, but not perhaps unpredictable, that faced with the moral dilemma posed by Ricklin, Hergé chose to keep his scout's word of honour to Tintin, but not to Germaine".

Influences

In writing and drawing Tintin in Tibet, Hergé drew upon a wide range of influences. The concept of setting the plot in the Himalayas, a snow-covered environment, was due to his repeating dreams of whiteness, and as Harry Thompson noted, "Hergé's fundamental need was to draw a white, snowy adventure" that had to "be a solo voyage of redemption for Hergé." Thompson believed that it was because of this idea of a personal voyage that most of the series' supporting cast were left out of the book, with Tintin only being accompanied by Snowy and Haddock on his journey. Hergé was also fascinated with "extra-sensory perception and the mysticism of Tibetan Buddhism", interests that he shared with his new wife Fanny, and these played important themes within Tintin in Tibet. He had learned about many aspects of the Tibetan esoteric from books such as those of Belgian explorer Alexandra David-Neel as well as the Englishman Lobsang Rampa's controversial work The Third Eye (1956, published in French in 1957), the accuracy of which has been heavily disputed.

To learn more about the Yeti, which he depicted as a particularly benevolent creature in his story, Hergé contacted the cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans (1916–2001), who had formerly aided him in his study of hypothetical moon exploration for Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. After reading the section on the Yeti in Heuvelmans' book Sur La Piste Des Bêtes Ignorées (On the Tracks of Unknown Animals), Hergé also went on to perform as much research into the cryptid as possible. According to Harry Thompson, Hergé "interviewed mountaineers, including Maurice Herzog, who had spotted the tracks of an enormous biped which stopped at the foot of a sheer rock face on Annapurna. Even the way in which the creature cares for the starving Chang is taken from a sherpa's account of a Yeti which rescued a little girl in similar circumstances."

Hergé collected together a large assortment of clippings, partly from National Geographic Magazine, that he filed away and used as a basis from which to draw Tintin in Tibet. Images found in the book such as the monks with their musical instruments, the sherpas with their backpacks and the plane crash wreckage, are all visually based upon clippings in Hergé's collection. Members of his Studio Hergé also helped him gather together source material for the story, for instance Jacques Martin (1921–2010), a member of the Studio and a comic strip writer in his own right, researched and drew all the costumes for the book.

Publication

Due to his emphasis on accuracy, Hergé added the logo of a genuine airline, Air-India, to the crash debris in Tintin in Tibet. However, this annoyed Air-India and a representative complained to Hergé about the adverse publicity that they might suffer, arguing that "It's scandalous, none of our aircraft has ever crashed. You have done us a considerable wrong." Air-India had cooperated closely with Hergé in facilitating his research by providing voluminous reading material, contemporary photographs and film footage of India and Nepal, especially of Delhi and Kathmandu. In the story-line, Air-India flew Tintin, Snowy and Haddock from Europe to Delhi and Kathmandu. The crashed aircraft's tail number began with "VT", still the country code for all Indian aircraft, and was VT-ORO, which no actual aircraft has ever had. Due to Air-India's objections, Hergé changed the logo in subsequent editions to the fictional Sari-Airways, however he also observed that there were so many Indian airlines that it was possible that there really was a Sari-Airways.

When the book was published in Chinese decades ago, the Chinese communist authorities had renamed it Tintin in China's Tibet. Hergé and his publishers protested and the title was changed back to its original name.

On 1 June 2006, Tintin became the first fictional character to be awarded the Dalai Lama's Truth of Light award. "For many people around the world Tintin in Tibet was their first introduction to Tibet, the beauty of its landscape and its culture. And that is something that has passed down the generations," said the International Campaign for Tibet's Simon van Melick. During the awarding ceremony copies of Tintin in Tibet in Esperanto (Tinĉjo en Tibeto) were distributed among the attendees and journalists.